Google Nexus 10 - first thoughts

Our Nexus 10 16GB Tablets arrived yesterday; the original delivery estimate took us into next week so we were pleasantly surprised to have some boxes to open.

Nice boxes too - decent packaging is a good start and comes as standard with an iPad.

First impressions in the hand were good. Very thin, reasonably light no uncomfortable edges and corners and the rubberised back feels nice and grippy.

After firing it up it took about 15 minutes to synch with my Google account and automatically download my core apps it prompted me to install a system update to Jelly Bean 4.2 which I did - if you're firing yours up for the first time this week (16th Nov today) you may wish to wait a few days (more on that below!).

A quick web browse with Firefox was a major fail; I once managed a few minutes without a crash but mostly it only took seconds. This is the first 4.2-update related problem which has apparently been solved in the forthcoming Firefox 17 release which should hit the updates on Tuesday 20th November.

Mildly frustrating but surfing with Chrome was very snappy through our 24Mb/Wireless N web connection and the tablet renders text and graphics cleanly and quickly.

As I'd hoped the display is stunning. Completely gorgeous in fact.

I plugged the tablet into my Windows 7 desktop and there was an instant driver match for Nexus 10 which was nice. I uploaded a folder of high-res photos taken with my DSLR.

The image quality is superb, the colours are strong and vivid and the sharpness provided by 300 pixels per square inch is breathtaking. The Jelly Bean gallery app is great for browsing big folders of pictures and seems to offer some pretty sophisticated image editing tools.

I then tried to fire up iPlayer; no deal. The tablet has no flash support so the desktop website doesn't work and the BBC Media App "is not compatible with your version of Android" (temporary Jelly Bean 4.2 fail number 2). Gah!

The standard Google Play eBook reader looks great in landscape with a double page view. The page-turn animation was good enough to have me flicking backwards and forwards for a minute or two. I couldn't see an easy way to access a locally-stored folder of eBooks, so fired up FBReader (my usual smartphone eBook app).

FB Reader worked fine as usual but now I'd seen the open-book view of the Google app I felt I was missing out!

A few quick goes on the standard Android games (Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Winds of Steel, Osmosis) showed off the screen well.

In short - lovely hardware, overly new OS, no ground-breaking Android Tablet apps. Great purchase.